Blog, projects and et cetera..

I moved jobs recently. Previously I had been using web technologies to create an application visualization development environment, a bit of a mouthful. The application was a form of website builders which is the simplest description I’ve been able to come up with. Using web technologies meant JavaScript and the place where I was working felt it might be a bit of a risky technology to use. The reasons from where firstly, JavaScript being an interpreted language meant that it was an inherently unsafe, in the sense that you’d have to wait till runtime for things to blow up, language. The other primary driver (look at me going all business-speak) was the very large gap between JavaScript and Java (the main development language in the rest of the company) meaning you might not be as easily able to use programmers from other teams on this new one. Plus tooling, development environments, documentation…etc.

A decision was made, and I ended up with two years+ worth of TypeScript experience.

The Windows environmental variables dialog (WEVD). We’ve all been there? I’ve been there. I’ve spent far more of my computing life and career there than I care to imagine there. I don’t know what your particular method is, perhaps you’re a type in place kind of person, maybe even a copy out to an external editor and paste back? I’ve been the later for a long time, because lets face it, the dialog sucks.

I’ve found a bug in your code…

Have you ever been in the following situation; where it has been 8 months since you worked on a piece of code, you have moved onto bigger and better things. Different features, a different project and horror of horrors you get an email saying someones has found a bug in your code. It was a reasonably complicated feature you worked on, it took a lot for you to get it to the state it was in, and perhaps it wasn’t as well unit tested as it should of been, or perhaps worst yet, it’s unit tested out the back end and every test is passing?

The fundamental premise of “Coder to Developer” is to provide a starting point or practical guide to becoming a well rounded Software Developer. To transcend the basic title of “Coder” and become someone who has a full understanding and command of the entire software development life cycle. Mike Gunderloy, following in the footsteps of authors such as Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmer fame, tries to give an insight (opinionated but practical) into what has gone into making him the developer that he is today.

Recently I learnt of a learning and study concept called “Copywork”. I subscribe to a great newsletter called the Art Of Manliness, which I highly recommend. They featured an article on this technique but pitched it more from the point of view of a author. This learning technique was popular in the 19th century and before. The way it worked was an individual would manually and meticulously copy great works of literature, or just course material if you were talking about schools; page for page, word for word. It acted as a form of study and even was consider a meditative practise.

I wanted to venture into open source software and do something cool. I still think jCC is a cool project, I just don’t have a lot of time to work on it right now. I hope that sometime in the future I can get back to it. Until then, use gist or the myriad of other services that can already do this kind of thing…

One of the things that bother me about JCC are the depencancies, in particular the depenancy on “MacWidgets”. This code base doesn’t seem like it is being actively developed, not to mention forcing the Mac style onto other operating systems is inappropriate to say the best. I do not appreciate an application casting it’s opinion on the OS I am using (it’s not a mac) and I don’t think Linux users would appriciate it that much either.

Just a quick post on the state of JCC. I spent a bit of time today get re-antiquated with the application, making notes and what not and am slowing translating the many, many comments in the code base from Italian to English. Thank you Google Translate!